Key Quote
“"Oh! my God! the down, / The soft young down of her"”
Charlotte Mew · The Farmer's Bride
Focus: “down”
The farmer's final, anguished outburst reveals the possessive desire beneath his earlier pragmatic tone. 'Down' — the fine, soft hair — reduces his wife to a physical detail, her body an object of his frustrated longing.
Technique 1 — DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE — UNRELIABLE NARRATION
Like Browning's 'My Last Duchess', Mew uses the dramatic monologue to let the farmer reveal more than he intends. His seemingly reasonable tone — 'We caught her' (as if catching an animal), 'She does the work about the house' — inadvertently exposes the dehumanisation at the heart of the marriage. He narrates his own cruelty without recognising it, making the reader simultaneously pity and condemn him.
The bride never speaks — her voice is entirely absent from the poem. Mew uses this silence to represent the voicelessness of married women in rural Victorian/Edwardian England. The farmer speaks for her, about her, and around her, but never to her. Her muteness is not just characterisation but a structural indictment (accusation) of a system that denied women the right to narrate their own experience.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
Both the farmer and his bride are trapped in a state of absolute stagnation. She is imprisoned in a marriage she fears; he is imprisoned by desire he cannot fulfil. Neither can move forward: she cannot leave, and he cannot connect. The final line — ending mid-sentence — suggests the stagnation will continue indefinitely, the relationship suspended in a permanent state of frustrated longing and mute terror.
Key Words
Technique 2 — ANIMAL IMAGERY — THE BRIDE AS WILD CREATURE
The bride is consistently described through animal imagery: she is 'like a hare', 'shy as a leveret' (young hare), associated with 'the wild things'. This dehumanising comparison reveals the farmer's inability to see her as a person — she is a creature to be caught, tamed, and kept. The word 'caught' (line 9) is literally used for capturing animals, not for human relationships.
Yet the animal imagery is also sympathetic — Mew invites us to see the bride's wildness as a form of resistance. She runs from the farmer 'like a hare', instinctively fleeing from danger. Her fear is animalistic because the threat is animalistic: the farmer's desire is predatory (hunting-like), and her flight is the only agency available to her. Nature represents freedom; the farmhouse represents captivity.
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Context (AO3)
MARRIAGE AS OWNERSHIP
In rural Victorian and Edwardian England, marriage was often an economic arrangement, not a romantic choice. Wives were expected to 'do the work about the house' — domestic labour in exchange for shelter and status. The farmer's complaint is not that he lacks love but that he lacks obedience — his wife fulfils her domestic duties but will not fulfil her 'wifely' duty of physical intimacy. Mew exposes marriage as a system of legitimate possession.
MEW'S HIDDEN LIFE
Charlotte Mew was a queer woman who lived in secrecy — she loved women but never openly acknowledged it. Her empathy for the trapped, voiceless bride may reflect her own sense of being imprisoned by social expectations. Mew struggled with poverty and mental illness, and eventually took her own life. Her poetry, rediscovered by feminists in the 20th century, gives voice to those who were silenced.
Key Words
WOW — THE CAPTIVE WOMAN & MARITAL RAPE (Feminist Legal Theory)
Mew's poem is arguably the most disturbing in the AQA anthology because of what it implies but never states. Marital rape was not a crime in England until 1991 — within marriage, a woman's body was legally her husband's property. The farmer's final, anguished desire ('the down, / The soft young down of her') carries an implicit threat: he is a man with legal rights over a woman who fears his touch. Feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon argued that the law's failure to recognise marital rape was not an oversight but a feature of patriarchal legal systems designed to ensure male sexual access. Mew's poem, written in 1916, captures this legal reality with devastating precision: the bride's fear is not irrational but a perfectly reasonable response to her structural vulnerability. The farmer's frustration, though presented sympathetically, is ultimately the frustration of a man denied something he believes he is owed — and the poem's open ending leaves the reader to imagine the consequences.
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